manta-live-session

Live box access — manta-probe

What this is for

Some work cannot be verified by a unit test: a screen that only renders with a real transcript, a card that only appears when a real turn blocks, a Simulator that has to be paired to a real box. Before this skill existed, agents wrote their own curl calls against the box and quietly got them wrong — the RPC body shape, the auth header, the fact that the prompt endpoint is asynchronous, and the fact that the pairing endpoint is loopback-only are each easy to miss, and a half-working request looks exactly like a broken feature.

manta-probe is the one supported way in. Do not hand-roll curl against the box; if this tool cannot do what you need, say so on the issue rather than improvising.

The one rule you cannot break

Every prompt runs on voska/default. There is no flag, no argument and no environment variable to change it — the model is a constant inside the tool. The other providers on this box are metered and are not yours to spend. If you find yourself wanting a different model, you are doing something this skill is not for.

Where it runs

The box is the Linux machine alphaclaw — the same machine the Linux agents already run on.

You are	Command form
a Linux agent (manta-dev, and anything on the box)	~/.local/bin/manta-probe <cmd>
the macos agent	ssh dev@alphaclaw '~/.local/bin/manta-probe <cmd>'

Always use the absolute path ~/.local/bin/manta-probe, never the bare name. A non-interactive SSH shell has a minimal PATH that does not include ~/.local/bin, so a bare manta-probe fails with "command not found" over SSH. This is verified, not theoretical — use the absolute form everywhere and the same line works from both machines.

Commands

# The one-shot most tasks want: fresh session, prompt, wait, print the reply.
~/.local/bin/manta-probe ask "Reply with exactly one word: PONG"

# Keep the session afterwards (to inspect it in the app, or prompt it again).
~/.local/bin/manta-probe ask "Read AGENTS.md and summarise section 6" --keep

# Long-form: drive a session across several turns.
SID=$(~/.local/bin/manta-probe new my-label)
~/.local/bin/manta-probe prompt "$SID" "first turn"
~/.local/bin/manta-probe prompt "$SID" "second turn"
~/.local/bin/manta-probe messages "$SID"     # dump the transcript

# Pair an iOS Simulator in one step — the app auto-claims this link, no typing.
~/.local/bin/manta-probe pair-url            # manta://pair?box=…&code=…
~/.local/bin/manta-probe pair-url --simctl   # the full xcrun simctl command
~/.local/bin/manta-probe pair                # raw code + URL (physical phone)
~/.local/bin/manta-probe server              # just the server URL

# Housekeeping — always finish with this.
~/.local/bin/manta-probe list
~/.local/bin/manta-probe clean